The left eats JK Rowling over transgender comments

[Emily Lake]

They are women by gender, usually gender identity specifically. I really don’t see what is either problematical or unclear about that statement of itself.

But what does "women by gender" mean? If it means that they believe that they are women, then the question is whether the meaning of the term "woman" is such that a sufficient condition for a person to be a woman is that they believe that they are a woman.

It means they are women by gender. Sorry, but I’m still not seeing the problem with saying that.

What are the consequences of that? What changes - for them as well as for everyone else?

 

[Emily Lake]

Yes, most. But being (biologically) male is not a unifying characteristic of trans women. Having been raised as a boy is. If Erika Schinegger had decided not to transition when she found out about her internal testicles (or if she had never found out), we would call her a cis-woman with a rare intersex condition, not a trans woman. And yet, by most definitions including the one you seem to employ, Erik Schinegger is biologically male.

This is confusing. Does this count as misgendering and deadnaming?

And if Erik is biologically male, and began presenting as male... I don't know if the prefix "trans" really applies at all. Yes, if that intersex condition had never been identified, the prevailing assumption would have continued to be cis-woman.

At the end of the day, though, I think intersex conditions are a red herring. Most people with an intersex condition aren't transgender in any meaningful way. And most people who are transgender are not intersex.

I have a friend whose condition falls into the cluster of "intersex". She has a physical and hormonal developmental disorder. Without diagnosis and medical intervention, she would never have entered puberty, it simply would not have triggered at all. As it is, she will take hormones for the rest of her life, but has about a 95% chance of being sterile. But she's still female, despite being intersex, and she is not transgender.

I have a niece who is transgender. She has (and has always had) normal male external parts, attached to normal male internal parts, which all do normal male part stuff. But she considers herself to be a woman. Nothing about her is intersex at all.

 

[Emily Lake]

You know what also happens: Women bullying women to have sex with them. Women bullying men to have sex with them. Men bullying men to have sex with them. Men bullying women to have sex with them. This is a problem of assholes, not a problem of transgendered people - unless you have solid evidence that trans women bullying cis women to have sex with them happens at significantly elevated rates.

http://www.gettheloutuk.com/blog/category/research/lesbians-at-ground-zero.html

 

[Bomb#20]

BTW, this is just plain false. To be trans, one must have undergone a transition from one gender to another. It's actually in the word.

That's a false etymology. "Trans" came from "transsexual", from the Latin word for "across", not from "transition".

This isn't about etymology, this is about common usage. A biologically male individual who was misidentified as a girl at birth, raised as a girl, and to this day doesn't think of themselves as anything other than a girl/woman isn't a trans woman in common usage.

Are you using "biologically male" to mean having a Y chromosome? A person who was identified as a girl at birth, raised as a girl, and to this day doesn't think of herself as anything other than a girl/woman must have a variety of typically female traits or she wouldn't have been systematically "misidentified", which means in common usage she's intersex, not "biologically male".

Even a genotypically male, phenotypically intersex baby who received "corrective" surgery to look more like a typical girl, was raised as a girl, and was never told their was anything unusual about their lower parts isn't a trans individual in common usage.

In common usage you don't have to have undergone a transition from one gender to another to be trans. Activists are no doubt busy updating Newspeak to match the latest purification of ideology; but in common usage there are still such things as post-op, pre-op, and non-op transsexuals.

"To be trans, the gender in your head has to not match your sex." and "To be trans, one must have undergone a transition from one gender to another." assert necessary conditions, not sufficient conditions. If you want to refute Metaphor's criterion you need examples of trans people whose head genders match their sexes, not examples of non-trans people whose head genders don't match their sexes.

 

[Emily Lake]

Of course it's possible. In fact, it's the only sensible definition. A female infant who's abducted at birth by a mad scientist who raises her as a boy as part of one of their mad scientist experiments, and who later transitions to become a woman in spite of the mad scientist's intention is going to be a trans woman.

Unless that mad scientist does a complete number on her biology and her hormones, so that she develops looking physically like a male, she would not be a transwoman in any reasonable sense. She might be seen as unfeminine, or butch... but she's not going to be viewed as a transwoman.

 

[krypton iodine sulfur]

You know what also happens: Women bullying women to have sex with them. Women bullying men to have sex with them. Men bullying men to have sex with them. Men bullying women to have sex with them. This is a problem of assholes, not a problem of transgendered people - unless you have solid evidence that trans women bullying cis women to have sex with them happens at significantly elevated rates.

http://www.gettheloutuk.com/blog/category/research/lesbians-at-ground-zero.html

What's weird is that when discussing the sample population used for the survey, the study itself states that it does not claim the sample is representative of the lesbian community. The sample size was eighty women, some of them in the author's own network. The study includes statements such as:

All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artefact, appropriating thisbody for themselves.

In another section:

Two respondents were not aware that the person they were about to have a sexual relationship withwas a biological male. If those “transwomen” were pre-op, we can argue that these constitute casesof rape by deception.

There are some disconcerting anecdotes in the report, which by all means must be taken seriously. However, if I applied some of the criteria used in various sections, I suppose I've been harassed, sexually assaulted, raped, and violently punished by cisgender lesbians. In some cases the study merely treats transgender women the way the study states transgender women treat them.

 

[Emily Lake]

Lived experience from the bubble known as the youtube comment section...

And you call other people deluded?

Not just youtube. Trans people on Twitter saying that not dating trans people is transphobic.

Just because you are in a cocoon doesn't mean we all are.

I disagree with Metaphor on almost every topic. This one, however, we mostly agree on.

And yes, the strange harassment of lesbians by transwomen is a real thing. There's a lot of pressure being put on cis-gendered lesbians to accept intact transwomen as sexual partners. And they say no - because they don't want penises in their vaginas - they're called transphobes. It's not an uncommon thing, and it's driving a fair schism in the LGBTQ+ community. There are several instances of lesbian spaces being invaded by transwomen with penises who want to have penis-in-vagina sex with lesbians. And there've been several occasions of lesbian spaces and events being shouted out or protested or otherwise cancelled as being transphobic or otherwise not inclusive enough because lesbians aren't interested in penises.

 

[Emily Lake]

It matters to the women playing sports and the women in toilet and locker rooms all across the world. But, their feelings don't count, I guess.

It's a much-overlooked social norm that women's desires and needs don't count. They are, socially speaking, simply less important than the desires and needs of people with penises.

 

[Emily Lake]

How many cis women's face, shoulders, hands, and feet have you seen, in real life, outside of fashion magazines and TV ads? For each of those features, there's a lot of intrasex variation and a considerable overlap between the normal ranges for men and women. Both of the women who gave birth to my children have fairly broad shoulders - probably not broader than mine in absolute terms, but quite possibly broader in relative terms, expressed as a ratio of shoulder width/body height; and definitely broader than many men I know - and I personally witnessed both of them giving birth. I have more delicate hands than my sister (who has given birth twice), with elongated nail beds and visible lunulae.

Now, it's probably harder to find men that fall within the normal female range of variation on all those features than on any individual one. It's probably well-nigh impossible with 40-year-old men, but already much easier with 19 year olds - and consequently, much easier with people who've taken hormone therapy since age 19 or before.

I think you're overstating the overlap here. Yes, many of the outwardly visible signifiers of sex have a spectrum, but the perception of a person as being male or female is based on a constellation of characteristics... And as a constellation, there's not very much overlap.

You mention that you have delicate hands. Are they also smaller, relative to your fore-arm length, than hers? Or are they larger proportionally? Do you also have narrower shoulders - not in terms of the width from left side to right side, but in terms of depth from front to back - relative to the depth of your pelvis and derriere? Do you have a v-shaped torso? A generally angular skull? Are your eyes deeper set relative to your brow-line, and are your eyes smaller relative to the width of your face?

You might have a feature that seems more feminine relative to other typical men... but I would bet that you've got fifty three other features that are firmly masculine.

Gender is a perceived attribute. It's what sex other people will assume you to be, based on the cluster of characteristics that they observe, and whether that cluster more closely resembles the characteristics of a male person or a female person. Some of those are socially defined - behavioral attributes, style of dress, comportment, etc. But those are not as big a driver as many think they are. We pretty much all know that a drag queen is not a female. And even if a gay guy is quite the femme, or a lesbian is quite the butch, most of the time, they still have physical signifiers of their sex that cluster them into the correct sex.

Hell, there's an entire field of forensic anthropology that deals with the physical and skeletal differences between males and females of the species.

 

[repoman]

Lived experience from the bubble known as the youtube comment section...

And you call other people deluded?

Not just youtube. Trans people on Twitter saying that not dating trans people is transphobic.

Just because you are in a cocoon doesn't mean we all are.

I disagree with Metaphor on almost every topic. This one, however, we mostly agree on.

And yes, the strange harassment of lesbians by transwomen is a real thing. There's a lot of pressure being put on cis-gendered lesbians to accept intact transwomen as sexual partners. And they say no - because they don't want penises in their vaginas - they're called transphobes. It's not an uncommon thing, and it's driving a fair schism in the LGBTQ+ community. There are several instances of lesbian spaces being invaded by transwomen with penises who want to have penis-in-vagina sex with lesbians. And there've been several occasions of lesbian spaces and events being shouted out or protested or otherwise cancelled as being transphobic or otherwise not inclusive enough because lesbians aren't interested in penises.

Had you ever been to the gendercritical subreddit that was banned last week?

There was a lot of talk about this, but of course being an echo chamber the intensity got to be a bit much.

 

[ruby sparks]

It means they are women by gender. Sorry, but I’m still not seeing the problem with saying that.

What are the consequences of that? What changes - for them as well as for everyone else?

My long answer to that probably involves a number of things I’ve already said in the thread.

My short answer is that I certainly think their gender should be recognised as being female.

The question, ‘but what are they, really?’ is a bit complicated I think. We might perhaps broadly say their sex is male but their gender is female. It’s an unusual combination (and probably a bit more complicated and varied than what I just said about it) so I’m not sure I would say they are ‘really’ male any more than I would say they are ‘really’ female. It seems like what they are ‘really’ is both, in different ways.

ETA: to go back to the OP (the first lines of the first post) I’m not familiar with exactly what Maya Forstater was fired for, but if it was for saying sex is real, then that seems a bit harsh (because it is) but if she said sex trumped gender (which is also real) because it was ‘more real’, I’m not so sure about that.

 

[Emily Lake]

Ten year olds can ABSOLUTELY consent and revoke consent to the full list of things ten year olds must do.

We have this conversation what, once a month? Every human goes through a puberty. Ten years old is pretty young, but it's not too young to ask whether they consent to going through a specific puberty at a specific time. If they don't, that's what blockers are for, so while they can't consent to ENTER a puberty they can revoke consent to enter some specific puberty until their decision is validated by a whole host of professionals, at which point it isn't a "sex change".

This view makes zero sense to me. It seems irrational to medically interrupt a perfectly normal, and normally functioning, biological process. Especially because puberty doesn't result only in physical changes. Puberty also triggers a host of behavioral and cognitive changes that are a normal part of human development.

For example, if a natal female doesn't enter puberty, she can suffer significant life-long loss of bone density, resulting in a materially higher risk of breaks and osteoporosis, and spinal disk degeneration. The adrenal gland triggers long-bone growth, but it's the pituitary (which is sex differentiated) that triggers the closure of growth plates.

There are real physical and mental side-effects to retarding or blocking puberty. It keeps a person in a state of suspended indefinite childhood. Full mental and emotional maturity won't occur without puberty.

And I really do end up baffled by the idea of framing this as if you're giving that child the choice of which sex to experience puberty as... because there's no way for them to experience the puberty of the other sex. A natal male who begins hormone therapy as a teen will grow breasts, sure. But he won't grow a vagina, and his hips won't widen, and he won't experience menarche. A natal female who takes testosterone as a teen won't grow boobs, but also won't develop a penis, and will never have nocturnal emissions or geometry-class boners.

 

[Emily Lake]

I disagree with Metaphor on almost every topic. This one, however, we mostly agree on.

And yes, the strange harassment of lesbians by transwomen is a real thing. There's a lot of pressure being put on cis-gendered lesbians to accept intact transwomen as sexual partners. And they say no - because they don't want penises in their vaginas - they're called transphobes. It's not an uncommon thing, and it's driving a fair schism in the LGBTQ+ community. There are several instances of lesbian spaces being invaded by transwomen with penises who want to have penis-in-vagina sex with lesbians. And there've been several occasions of lesbian spaces and events being shouted out or protested or otherwise cancelled as being transphobic or otherwise not inclusive enough because lesbians aren't interested in penises.

Had you ever been to the gendercritical subreddit that was banned last week?

There was a lot of talk about this, but of course being an echo chamber the intensity got to be a bit much.

No, I don't really do reddit at all.

I do have some pretty frank conversations with my various friends and family who compromise a wide variety of gender and sexual identities. My niece has been pretty vocal about her opinion that lesbians who refuse to get into physical relationships with transwomen who have penises are transphobic bigots. A couple of my cousins, and my aunt, have much more discretely shared that they've been pressured by intact transwomen, and have been called names when they declined interest in someone who has a penis.

I'm certain this isn't the case with all transwomen, and I don't mean to imply such a thing. But it's also not completely made up.

 

[krypton iodine sulfur]

This view makes zero sense to me. It seems irrational to medically interrupt a perfectly normal, and normally functioning, biological process. Especially because puberty doesn't result only in physical changes. Puberty also triggers a host of behavioral and cognitive changes that are a normal part of human development.

Puberty isn't indefinitely stopped. It's delayed. While there can be side effects, it has to be weighed against the risks of doing nothing, or doing the wrong thing. Either case can result in considerable harm.

 

[J842P]

This view makes zero sense to me. It seems irrational to medically interrupt a perfectly normal, and normally functioning, biological process. Especially because puberty doesn't result only in physical changes. Puberty also triggers a host of behavioral and cognitive changes that are a normal part of human development.

Puberty isn't indefinitely stopped. It's delayed. While there can be side effects, it has to be weighed against the risks of doing nothing, or doing the wrong thing. Either case can result in considerable harm.

It's a tricky situation with likely no good answers at this point. Certainly, there are cases where the long term benefit would probably be to go on gender affirming hormone treatment which would include delaying puberty. Surgical intervention, at least as far as I can tell, is probably not a good option until you are older.

Then there is the third-rail topic of people who wish to detransition. I don't know if this is true, but my perception is that this tends to be transmen. But that may just be because of the particular cases I've seen.

 

[krypton iodine sulfur]

Certainly, there are cases where the long term benefit would probably be to go on gender affirming hormone treatment which would include delaying puberty. Surgical intervention, at least as far as I can tell, is probably not a good option until you are older.

Current guidelines tend to be sixteen for hrt and eighteen for surgeries, though there are some exceptional cases. Personally, I would argue against a higher minimum threshold than that.

Then there is the third-rail topic of people who wish to detransition. I don't know if this is true, but my perception is that this tends to be transmen. But that may just be because of the particular cases I've seen.

Third-rail... perhaps. Part of the issue is 'desistance' was very frequently brought up as an almost knee-jerk reaction to any gender-affirming actions in youth (medical or non-medical). Quite often the desistance arguments relied on misinterpretations of a handful of studies (and one study in particular). But mistakenly transitioning is a serious issue, and all steps should be taken to reduce that likelihood as much as possible. Right now standards of care and diagnostic criteria may not be very consistently applied. Also, both likely need to be improved.

 

[Emily Lake]

This view makes zero sense to me. It seems irrational to medically interrupt a perfectly normal, and normally functioning, biological process. Especially because puberty doesn't result only in physical changes. Puberty also triggers a host of behavioral and cognitive changes that are a normal part of human development.

Puberty isn't indefinitely stopped. It's delayed. While there can be side effects, it has to be weighed against the risks of doing nothing, or doing the wrong thing. Either case can result in considerable harm.

Of course. For the rare cases where a child has very prominent, persistent, and obvious gender dysphoria, with dangerous or self-damaging stress or anxiety associated, delaying puberty is probably preferable to suicide. That would make sense. But absent those... I tend toward opposing interventionary puberty blockers.

 

[Emily Lake]

Certainly, there are cases where the long term benefit would probably be to go on gender affirming hormone treatment which would include delaying puberty. Surgical intervention, at least as far as I can tell, is probably not a good option until you are older.

Current guidelines tend to be sixteen for hrt and eighteen for surgeries, though there are some exceptional cases. Personally, I would argue against a higher minimum threshold than that.

Then there is the third-rail topic of people who wish to detransition. I don't know if this is true, but my perception is that this tends to be transmen. But that may just be because of the particular cases I've seen.

Third-rail... perhaps. Part of the issue is 'desistance' was very frequently brought up as an almost knee-jerk reaction to any gender-affirming actions in youth (medical or non-medical). Quite often the desistance arguments relied on misinterpretations of a handful of studies (and one study in particular). But mistakenly transitioning is a serious issue, and all steps should be taken to reduce that likelihood as much as possible. Right now standards of care and diagnostic criteria may not be very consistently applied. Also, both likely need to be improved.

Sixteen for HRT doesn't seem completely crazy to me... but that also wouldn't really be "prior to puberty" either. By sixteen, most teens are well over 90% through puberty. Girls breasts are mostly done growing at that point, and their hips have already widened, and they've already had menarche. Boys testes have already dropped, their voices have lowered, and they've gained muscle mass and bone density. There's some tidying up that still goes on, with some additional growth and some facial changes as fat is removed or redistributed, but it's fairly minor compared to what has occurred prior to sixteen.

Surgical transition at eighteen is fine, because... legal adult.

I definitely agree that diagnostic criteria needs to evolve.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

All zygotes are female and change sex in utero and now, due to medical science, ex-utero.

Umm... no. We can't medically change actual sex ex-utero.

"Actual sex." You mean, "biological" sex and yes we can as in, we are capable of doing so. What you are referring to in your subsequent list is a current status of the art, not a permanent, or insurmountable status. Whatever we may not yet be able to achieve today will soon be something second hand tomorrow as the state of the art of such surgery/modifications improves over time.

The outward appearance of a thing doesn't necessarily define the thing itself.

Very true.

Changing the outward appearance of a thing doesn't change its inherent nature.

That too makes unsubstantiated assumptions, such as there is something "inherent" as opposed to merely chemically dependent. The only reason I am male, for example, is because a particular drug triggered a sex change at a particular moment in my fetal development while I was in the womb.

But pointing to a drug and saying, "That is the magic potion that permanently changes lead into gold" is 16th century thinking at best. As is the notion that we constitute anything "inherent" instead of what we actually are; an ever changing bag of chemical reactions.

Says the heterosexual who then goes on to demonstrate the exact opposite here...

I feel like I missed something here, because I'm about 99.8% sure that Metaphor is gay.

Changing the outward appearance of a thing doesn't change its inherent nature, remember? Metaphor has testicles, which serve only one biological purpose; to impregnate women. Therefore, he is biologically heterosexual.

 

[krypton iodine sulfur]

Of course. For the rare cases where a child has very prominent, persistent, and obvious gender dysphoria, with dangerous or self-damaging stress or anxiety associated, delaying puberty is probably preferable to suicide. That would make sense. But absent those... I tend toward opposing interventionary puberty blockers.

It's not just a question of suicide and anxiety. Dysphoria can increase through puberty as various changes take place. Some of them are irreversible. Some are partially reversible. Some can only be treated surgically. A few are reversible. We're talking about lifelong issues which can be quite detrimental.

Sixteen for HRT doesn't seem completely crazy to me... but that also wouldn't really be "prior to puberty" either.

By hrt, I was referring to cross-sex hormones. Puberty blockers would start as early as the onset of puberty.